After the publication of the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s poems in 1857, art critic John Ruskin wrote a letter to the author, who had complained about unfaithful Pre-Raphaelite illustrations of his ballad ‘The Lady of Shalott’. John Ruskin pointed out that: ‘Many of the plates are very noble things, though not (…) illustrations of your poems. I believe, in fact, that good pictures never can be; they are always another poem, subordinate but wholly different from the poet’s conception, and serve chiefly to show the reader how variously the same verses may affect various minds’.
‘The Lady of Shalott’ tells the story of a lady locked up in a tower on an island, secluded from Camelot. She is cursed to weave on a tapestry reflections she sees from the outside in a mirror. The Lady is forbidden to look at the exterior, otherwise she is to die. One day, she sees Sir Lancelot’s reflection, falls in love with him so cannot help but look across the window. Knowing she is doomed, the Lady gets on a barge and floats down towards Camelot, singing her last song. When she arrives, dead, Lancelot barely notices her, only commenting on her beauty.
Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poems were extremely popular during the Victorian era: after Wordsworth’s death in 1850, he was appointed Poet Laureate by the Queen until 1892. During his life and after his death, Tennyson’s ballads - especially ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and ‘Elaine’ - were over-represented at the summer exhibitions of the Royal Academy. John William Waterhouse (1849 – 1917) produced three versions of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, depicting different moments in the poem. As opposed to Pre-Raphaelite painters illustrating the Moxon edition, little is known about Waterhouse’s biography and personality; studies about his work are relatively scarce. How one can explain that this painting is so iconic and that ‘The Lady of Shalott’ became a recurrent subject-matter in nineteenth century British art?
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| John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888 Oil on canvas, 153 x 200 cm Tate Britain |
The visual impact of Tennyson’s ballad partly accounts for the growing interest in representing The Lady of Shalott on canvas. The poetic and chronological structure functions in terms of tableaux: the ballad is divided in four parts, each recording another step in the course of the storyline, like paragraphs in prose. Part I describes the setting. Part II is about the Lady and her curse, while the third part registers the breaking of the spell. In the last part, the main protagonist puts an end to her life. The various sections reach a climax before ending up on the chorus ‘The Lady of Shalott’: ‘She knows not what the ‘curse’ may be/ And so she weaveth steadily/ And little other care hath she/ The Lady of Shalott’.
The boat scene follows the climax of the plot, when the Lady breaks her spell: ‘And down the river’s dim expanse (…) Did she look to Camelot. And at the closing of the day/ She loosed the chain and down she lay’. Besides, setting the scene just before nightfall suggests that it is the twilight of the Lady’s life. It also provides readers with a partial glimpse of the Lady’s appearance, while she is never characterised in physical terms otherwise, there she adopts a ‘glassy countenance’, and her dress is described as ‘snowy white’. On the whole, the scene functions in terms of contrasts, between interior/ exterior, contemplation/ action, her austere existence/ the tapestry’s colourful designs. This thematical complexity embodied a challenge for visual artists who had to juxtapose these elements in a single image.Each stanza is built the same way. It contains nine lines with an aaaabcccb rhyme scheme. The simplicity of the rhymes evokes an ancient tale, a device reinforced by the use of linguistic archaisms. The anaphoric final line of each stanza provokes an impression of falling rhythm; the alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables enhances the story’s musical quality. Rather than being strictly narrative, each stanza might be regarded as a static panel. In the first part, the setting conveys a pastoral, idyllic atmosphere. The poet displays intensity of detail, using the lexical field of nature, bringing out plants, trees and flowers. Tennyson highlights this visual dimension by resorting to metaphors and figures of speech: the polyptotom ‘reapers, reaping’ conjures up the cyclical status of nature, reproduced onto the tapestry (‘there she weaves by night and day’). The integration of a visual form of art in the poem provided artists with rich material to depict key instants from the story.
Tennyson’s ballad became increasingly popular after its publication. He was careful to tune his works to the sensibilities of his audience. Even though Tennyson’s poetry meant to be didactic, the absence of a clear message left the boat scene open to interpretation. It problematised the relationship between fiction and reality in parabolic terms: earlier on, the narrator implies that the Lady is satisfied with her situation, that she does not want to face reality because it is equated with pain and death; some images of her tapestry portray burials for she has seen funeral processions passing by the window. The moment when the Lady goes out of the tower represents her first contact with the outside, whereas she used to be compelled to gaze at reflections of the exterior. She accepts to experience love and death, and so to live as a mortal being. In a way, Tennyson reconfigured Plato’s myth of the cave for a Victorian audience. The combination of naturalistic details and supernatural elements increases the story’s imaginative potential; it enabled artists to create ambiguity between realistic handling of the subject and some sense of fantasy. Mystery comes from the unknown nature of the curse. Besides, the unnamed Lady seems endowed with magical powers, she is thought to be ‘a fairy’.
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| John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott 1894, oil on canvas, 142 x 86 cm Leeds City Art Gallery |
Tennyson’s fame in the 1850s coincided with the development of literary illustration. New techniques for reproducing paintings, like wood engraving, were made cheaper and more accessible. These were made as mass-produced commercial items, while fine art in oils appealed predominantly to connoisseurs or wealthy collectors. Middle-class patrons were supposed to decipher literary references, even though quotations were not attached to artworks. Artists – especially Royal Academicians such as Waterhouse – deliberately required their well-educated viewers to recognise the initial source, to satisfy their learning. But instead of producing a piece for a specific individual, even fine artists were painting for an anonymous audience. Their pictures could be seen in a review, printed on a journal, through an engraving, or in a public exhibition. The importance of the original diminished since reproduction was progressively more lucrative than the price obtained for the initial painting. The recuperation of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ by popular culture was vividly criticised by Tennyson: ‘Why am I popular?’ he wrote to his friend William Allingham, ‘I don’t write very vulgarly’.
Tennyson’s reluctance to be identified with the masses – despite the fact his publications in gift books or periodicals boosted his income – revealed his concerns about the material form his poetry took. Artists’ responses to the poem could be highly personal, as shown in Hunt’s oil version of his Moxon illustration. The poet had chastised this depiction of the Lady, whose hair flowing upwards made her appear as a wild, sensuous woman. Tennyson disliked illustration as a genre, not just because it connected his poetry to the marketplace, but also because representations were increasingly independent from the initial source. Paintings of the ballad were indeed physically detached from the verse, unlike illustrations.
The boat scene started to be popular in the late nineteenth century only. Waterhouse’s use of large format and pyramidal composition strike the viewer’s attention. Unlike any representation of the boat scene, the lady is sitting. The image works like a text, from the left, to the right: the stern’s curve is joined to the stairs leading to the tower, where the Lady had formerly been imprisoned, and the tapestry’s colourful designs recall the Lady’s past life. Waterhouse took up elements of previous drawings absent from the text: the lantern and the three candles on the prow – two of them being already out – suggesting her imminent doom. The obscure handling of the background provokes an impression of depth; it also indicates the Lady’s journey to the world of the dead.The topic attracted Pre-Raphaelite artists on account of its spiritual nobility, nostalgic atmosphere, and the theme of unrequited love. They preferred the inexplicit ballad to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King: its interpretation was not straightforward. William Holman Hunt (1827 – 1910), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882) and John Everett Millais (1829 – 1896) had already represented young women on the verge of dying. It is then not surprising that many artists decided to depict the apex of the plot, summarized in the anaphora: ‘she left the web/ she left the loom/ she made three paces through the room’. These lines were the most well-known of the poem, and what readers remembered from it, because it enclosed the dramatic intensity of the story.
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| William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott 1886-1905, oil on canvas, 143,7 x 186 cm Wadsworth Athaneum |
For Hunt, concerned about the morality of his pictures, the breaking of the spell symbolised a moment of revelation. His awareness of painting’s temporal restrictions is displayed through the combination of two instants: the picture shows the Lady looking at Lancelot and the web flowing. Waterhouse’s depiction of the spell breaking is remarkable for the lady’s intense gaze, directed at the viewer. He painted the ‘I’m half-sick of shadows’ scene too, just before the Lady sees Lancelot. It allowed him to represent a woman at a window, a theme popularised by the Pre-Raphaelites, whose erotic appeal was suggested through the pose, releasing her muscles from hours of weaving.
Stylistically, Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott was at the crossroads of various traditions. Waterhouse reconfigured history painting by adapting it to the Victorians’ passion for subject-matter. Victorian audiences were extremely demanding about the authenticity of the model’s action, its role in the painting. In The Lady of Shalott, the emphasis is on the model’s individuality, pose and expression. The realism of the scene is rendered through naturalistic treatment of detail and diverse textures: her eyes are swollen because of crying, her finely delineated features contrast with the softer treatment of her hair. Waterhouse does not idealise his model; she is not particularly beautiful. Art critic F.G. Stephens disliked the woman’s ‘commonplace’ look, a term that often used for Pre-Raphaelite models.
Though initially against the Royal Academy, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had progressively been institutionalised as a national school. The choice of literary sources (Shakespeare, Arthurian legends, Tennyson), British models and locations enabled the Brotherhood’s works to belong to cultural heritage. Their choice of subject-matter was constantly re-defined by late Victorian artists who freed themselves from the Brotherhood’s formal doctrines. Waterhouse’s emotionally charged themes, dense compositions and rich colour palette explain why he was said to belong to a third Pre-Raphaelite generation.
The Lady of Shalott embodied a turning point in Waterhouse’s career. Of all his recurrent themes, the Lady of Shalott, along with Ophelia and Miranda, were the British heroines he represented at least twice. It precluded Waterhouse’s shift to English literature and medieval romance. Since then, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton’s influence had led him to interpret scenes derived from Ancient history or Greco-Latin mythology. Waterhouse’s other medieval subjects were inspired by the works of Romantic poets, such as Tennyson (Saint Cecilia), Keats (La Belle Dame sans Merci), all of them focussing on the tragic destiny of female characters. The Victorians perceived Arthurian legends as a powerful model of nationalism. Queen Victoria herself declared medievalism of public importance, she revitalised the Camelot court as a promise of order and civilisation. It provided Britons with a certain code of behaviour; its element of escapism symbolised an alternate set of values against the rise of materialism and secularisation. It stood for a meaningful, spiritual standard of stability. John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836 – 1893) on the other hand, reinforced the morbid aspect of the narrative by setting the scene at twilight, a device making the ominous shape of the boat stand out against the reddish blood background.
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| John Atkinson Grimshaw, The Lady of Shalott, 1878 Oil on canvas, private collection |
Even if Waterhouse’s lady appeared more physically mature, all characters embodied the medieval ideal of the fair maiden. Symbolically, her white dress alluded to purity. She was represented as a martyr in swoon that Tennyson called ‘the highest type of woman’, whose ‘loss’ was to be regretted. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ typified a transposition of the chivalric ideal of courtly love favoured by the Victorians, with the difference that the male role was less significant, despite his responsibility in the Lady’s death. Tennyson re-adapted the theme of courtly love by emphasising the Lady’s loneliness, her passion seeming platonic and secret, devoid of physicality. Paradoxically, the boat scene on canvas looks sensual and transcendent, reversing the traditional pattern of the knight’s devotion to his Lady: she abandons herself entirely to love.
In many respects, Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott is a typical British subject-matter. The model may look ordinary, but the artist was careful to depict an English beauty. During the Victorian era, scientists and ethnologists investigated about Celtic physical traits. It was believed that pale skin, auburn or Venetian blonde hair were their characteristic features; scientists actually debated whether the Arthurians were red-head Celts or very fair Anglo-Saxons. The Lady’s features can be perceived as a combination of the Celtic and the Anglo-Saxon looks. Waterhouse reinforced Celtic authenticity through the Lady’s dress and accessories (girdle, necklace, tiara), appealing to the Victorian taste for costume drama. By elaborating on the original source, Waterhouse reinterpreted the poem’s feeling of medievalism, while Tennyson’s medieval imagery was only conveyed through the location of the island and language.
Many art critics praised Waterhouse’s painting for its poetic aspect, because of its ability to convey a certain atmosphere. Waterhouse selected the moment within the incident to hold the viewer in contemplation. Though less dramatic than Hunt’s or Waterhouse’s 1894 version, the 1888 picture froze a moment of transition: from the inside of the tower to the outside world, from love’s desperation to death. Rather than being strictly narrative, The Lady of Shalott was supposed to express a mood of melancholy through graceful forms, tonal harmony and evocative autumnal hues.
Waterhouse sought to address in The Lady of Shalott contemporary debates about the role of the artist in society and questions about women’s condition. The ballad interrogated the relationship between the artist – a weaver – and reality, the artist’s contact with the outside materialising in destruction. If Tennyson implied that the true artist should keep away from the outside, Waterhouse’s painting re-adapted the issue of problematic creativity. Tennyson described the setting as an idyllic utopia, whereas Waterhouse’s landscape is a reflection of the Lady’s inner state of mind, hence its gloomy aspect.With the addition of meaningful symbols – lantern, tapestry, candles, crucifix – the Lady became the artistic agent of her death: in Waterhouse’s painting she fashions her funeral as a work of art. The 1888 version showed the main protagonist as a beautiful figure to be looked at, but the Lady faces the spectator’s gaze too. Waterhouse exposed the metamorphosis of the Lady from artist to woman by enhancing her physicality. The draperies reveal the Lady’s breast and belly, alluding to sensuality and potential fertility, whereas Tennyson’s Lady is presented as an unattainable, pure character.
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| John William Waterhouse, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows 1915, oil on canvas, 100 x 74 cm Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto |
In the Victorian era, the most popular form of modern moral subjects was the representation of the fallen woman, who fell from grace by losing her innocence. The expression came to be closely associated with the loss of a woman’s virginity. The fallen woman often featured as a red-head because of her biblical association with prostitute Mary Magdalene. The subject combined conflicting notions of femininity, such as innocence/ experience, virgin/ whore, redemption/ responsibility, at a time when the “woman’s question” was raised in social terms. The Victorians regarded the domestic, married woman as the epitome of respectability whose role was to preserve the purity of the home, whereas the prostitute or the adulteress was conceived in terms of deviance.
The Lady’s face in fact displays a strange combination of the childlike and the erotic, between sexual awakening and religious revelation. Desire is fashioned both as liberation and destruction. Waterhouse reconfigured the traditional Renaissance association between sensual ecstasy and spiritual rapture to infuse it with some decadent sensibility. The Lady’s pose in Waterhouse’s painting expresses both abandon and terror. The scene stands for a transition from one state – innocence – to another – sexual knowledge – a theme Waterhouse readapted countless times in his later paintings. The Lady of Shalott blends the fair maiden ideal with the prototype of the femme fatale. This picture discloses Symbolist touches through its decadent figure embodying the fears and desires of the male gaze. The topic attracted late nineteenth century artists because of the sensuality aroused by the Lady’s recumbent yet beautiful body. Moreover, the association between woman and water increases the picture’s sense of mystery. The drowning woman motif evoked the mythological tradition of the dead driven to the Underworld by boatswain Charon. The Lady of Shalott provided Waterhouse with a decadent theme that delineated the parallel between the aquatic element and female curves.
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| Sophie Anderson, The Lily Maid of Astolat, 1870 Oil on canvas, 158,4 x 240,7 cm Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool |
The fact that the Lady was perceived as weak and delicate can entice us to regard the scene as the locus of male dominance, symbolising desires for feminine passivity. In that sense, the Lady serves as a fetishistic commodity. The fulfilment of the Lady’s destiny can only be accomplished in death since she is guilty of sexual awakening. Her desire cannot be but auto-destructive. The Lady’s madness becomes the agent of her redemption through transcendence. Her death accounts for her heroic qualities. It is worth mentioning that these paintings were directed at a predominantly male audience. Still, the Lady might also be viewed as the independent ‘New Woman’ controlling her destiny, looking almost ominous. She is active in the weaving of her own story which outcome is self-sacrifice. The Victorians recognised the Lady as making choices like a man would, refusing to act passively.
The preservation of The Lady of Shalott as a powerful image is made possible thanks to the timelessness of the setting and story. Its pictorial force comes from this ability to reconcile high culture and popular subcultures, by appealing to well-learned viewers who enjoy Tennyson’s ballad and spectators who do not need to know the poem to appreciate the picture. Even though she is fully clothed, the Lady might have encouraged fantasy in the Victorian subconscious without forcing the viewer to stare at a completely nude figure: for the Victorians, who saw little flesh in daily life, the suggestion of the Lady’s curves through her draperies was highly erotic. Nowadays, the picture’s fame might be explained by its contrast with explicit erotica available on demand. The Lady of Shalott displays a fantasy of romance rather than banal sexuality. The Lady’s radical dissociation from any social context and her incarceration in a tower for reasons unknown enticed artists and viewers to draw diverse interpretations from it. The ambiguous conception of femininity, its paradox between the Lady’s self-fulfilment and submissive attitudes account for its charms. Eventually, Waterhouse’s choice of subject-matter overcame the literary knowledge of the average viewer, its force lying in its dramatic simplicity and appealing mood.
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